Journaling for Record Keeping and Deschooling

In the state where we live, we don't have to show our homeschooling records to anyone.  Still, I decided to start keeping records of what we do once the kids hit compulsory school age.  The first year, I only kept records for E, which I summarized in the post E's First Official Not School Year.  I mostly only wrote down the things that would be considered "academic" or "educational" by school standards.  Last year, I recorded these things for both E and L.  I started to write a similar post, but it was so time consuming I didn't finish.  That's all time I could be spending with my kids instead!

At first, I wanted this record keeping to serve as a Homeschooling Record for legal purposes if ever needed and also as memories.  After doing it for two years though, I expanded the purpose of doing it.  I wanted it to be a legal record, memories, reminders, and encouragement.  Also, because D is now in another city for work most of the time, this is a record of memories for him since he's missing a lot, (even though we talk every day).

I also noticed that because I was mostly writing down the things that a school would consider academic or educational, I began to have the tendency to put more importance on those things than on other activities.  I tried very hard not to let this affect the way I related to the kids, the things I suggested that we do or the things I helped them do, but it was a thing in the back of my mind all the time.  I didn't like that.

So this year, I'm doing things a bit differently.  This is my system:

I have a spiral bound notebook that I usually keep in the kitchen (up high enough that a certain 3 year old doesn't swipe it.  Low enough that I see it when I pop into the kitchen throughout the day).  

-I write down things that all the kids do, school age or not.

-I write down all types of things without trying to put them in school categories or "educationese."  I can always comb through and do that later if this were ever actually needed as a legal school record.  It probably won't be however, and writing down all sorts of things helps keep myself in the mindset that we are always learning, not only when it can be qualified and quantified in schoolish ways.
-I'm not putting dates, though I might go back and put a note of each month and separate it by months from now on, just to make it easier to find things.  

-I abbreviate and I'm concise, usually just putting just enough to jog my memory, not long paragraphs or stories.  I make a note if I've put a longer story on my blog or a message board or facebook.

- There are some things that they do daily that I don't write down every day.  I make a note in the margins like, "Daily- play with neighborhood kids, ride bikes/scooters/ripstick," or "Daily- help with baby A without being asked- like to dress her, change her diaper, carry her, bathe her, play with her."

Even if you don't need to keep records for your state, this is a great help for deschooling.  Everything I write down makes me even more aware of all the things I'm not writing down.  Writing down "played Littlest Pet Shop" doesn't do any justice to 2 hours spent cooperating with each other, organizing and grouping items, massive amounts of imagination used for pretending, learning from each other, relating their current pretend game to other concepts and incorporating those ideas, and on and on.  I can't possibly record it all or quantify it all or even be aware of everything going on in their heads that I can't see.

I highly recommend doing it for a month or a week or even a day and seeing just how much learning you can observe when you're paying attention.  At the end of a day, you might think back and not be able to remember much that was particularly exciting, but when you write it down, it's suddenly much more obvious that learning was happening all the time.  

The Math Tool

I started out writing this thinking about how math is a tool that most people use to do the things they want to do, and not an interest that most people learn for it's own sake.  I was thinking about how math isn't it's own *thing* for most people. Most people don't do math for the sake of doing math. It's a tool to explore the thing they are interested in doing. A tool for cooking or sewing or wood working or check balancing or shopping or driving.


The more I wrote though, the more I realized that separates the concepts too much.  A hammer is a tool and most people don't pick it up unless they need to hammer in a nail.  Most people don't think about hammers, where they come from, or how they are made, unless they are interested in making hammers.  However, hammers are also made of the same metals from which many other things are made.  Hammers have a history that ties into every era of the world, which is directly related to what materials and process was used to make them and who made them- blacksmiths or factories.

Like with everything, even the tools are interconnected to everything else in the world.  So yes, math is a tool, but that doesn't make it separate from the interests that require its use.  That's what schools say- that you need to acquire the tools in order to be able to follow the interest.  In real life, the tools are inherently part of the interest.  You gather them AS you experience the interest.  Then you use the tools you gathered to deepen and widen the interest and as it is expanding, so are your tools.  It's an ever changing, ongoing process.

So why do we tend to view math as “basic math” and “higher math” if math is everywhere and inherent in every interest? Why divide it that way?  Well, because that is the way schools divide it.  First you learn 2+2, then division, multiplication and fractions.  You only learn "higher math" if you succeed in the lower levels.  Otherwise you're told you're "just not a math person," and by the time you enter high school you've already decided that because you're just not a math person, you'll have to go into a field of work that doesn't require higher math.

That's so sad!  Math teachers will say "math is everywhere in the world," but kids don't really learn to see it, because no one points it out and connects it to this nebulous concept called "math."  Or they do learn the ideas and concepts, but they don't realize it has anything to do with the math they do on paper at school, and they don't have the terminology for it unless and until they reach a "higher math" class.

Because of our own schooled backgrounds, most unschooling parents like myself aren't able to see the math in everything. Sure I do fine using fractions when I cook with the kids, or helping them divide the box of 12 icecreams into equal portions for each of them, or noticing that my 8 year old can tell you that at 7:50 it's 10 minutes until 8:00.  Even things like degrees, angles, and some algebra have come up.  We do that kind of math all the time.

I'm aware, however, of my own shortcomings in really seeing math, the concepts of math not just the numbers, in everything.  I wish I could point out more of the math they are discovering in every day life and give it a name for them.  The song Let it Go in the movie Frozen casually mentions "fractals."  I knew it was a math term, but until I looked it up, I didn't know what it meant. 



So I found an interesting resource for really seeing the math everywhere called Moebius Noodles.  (I had to look up what moebius means too).  I'm reading the book right now.  It isn't unschooling, but it's not a normal curriculum either.  A lot of math curriculums try to "make math fun," which usually translates into taking the same old arithmetic problems and dressing them up with cartoon characters, and creating games that still revolve around arithmetic.  Moebius Noodles is all about seeing that "mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and structures, rather than 'little manipulations of numbers.'"

The Moebius Noodles books says:
"Children have more imagination than it takes to do differential calculus. They are frequently all too literate like logicians and precise like set theorists. They are persistent, fascinated with strange outcomes, and are out to explore the “what-if” scenarios.....children are required to develop their mathematical skills rather than being encouraged to work on something more nebulous, like the mathematical state of mind. Along the way the struggle and danger are de-emphasized, not celebrated – with good intentions, such as safety and security. In order to achieve this, children are introduced to the tame, accessible scraps of math, starting with counting, shapes, and simple patterns. In the process, everything else mathematical gets left behind “for when the kids are ready.” For the vast majority of kids, that readiness never comes. Their math stays simplified, impoverished, and limited. That’s because you can’t get there from here. If you don’t start walking the path of those exotic and dangerous math adventures, you never arrive.
It is as tragic as if parents were to read nothing but the alphabet to children, until they are “ready”

for something more complex. Or if kids had to learn “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” by heart before being allowed to listen to any more involved music. Or if they were not allowed on any slide until, well, learning to slide down in completely safe manner."

The book has games, but they are games that demonstrate how concepts normally only discussed in  algebra, geometry, trigonometry or calculus classes are very present in the real world in things that kids do every day.

I'm really looking forward to using this book, not as a curriculum for them, but as a way for me to learn more about math in the real world so I can point it out to them when they are interested as we go about our daily lives.  And we'll play the games the way we play all games- when they are interested, for as long or short a time as they'd like. 

"Hardly doing anything."

I keep seeing phrases similar to these tossed around:

"We're not doing much for preschool since we're unschooling for now."
"I hardly did anything with him till he was 7.  We unschool during the younger years."

I know what these people mean.  They mean they didn't do any formal curriculum, and they didn't structure their child's day around "preschool learning activities."

But they usually go on to say that they read books, played games, played outside, let their kid help with things around the house, went for walks, talked about the world around them...

In other words, they WERE doing things with their child.  To say "we hardly did anything because we unschool" implies that unschooling isn't doing anything.  I remember saying something similar with E was 2 or 3.  I was trying to explain my excitement about what I was reading about unschooling and I said I was looking forward to "sitting back and watching her learn."

Sometimes it happens that way.  Sometimes I can just sit and watch while my kids play a game or discover something new and see that they are learning.  But "hardly doing anything" or "sitting back and watching," doesn't convey the importance of parents being involved and active.  I love this graph about how much time you should spend with your kids. 

It seems like people don't know how to do something with kids unless they are doing something that looks like school.  Or they don't *count* the MANY things they are doing as "doing something" because it doesn't look like school.

Spend time with your "preschool" age child.  Read books, play games, watch movies, look up cool stuff, go for walks, cook and sing and dance together, go fun places, eat fun food, dig in the dirt, pay attention to what they are interested in and do more of it.  Then if you're still doing that when they are 5 or 6 or 7 and they still aren't in school or school-at-home, call it unschooling.

Or call it unschooling now!  I did, since I intended to continue doing those same things and not send my child to school and not start school at home, and I was using ideas and philosophies from parents unschooling with older kids and seeing how well they work.

Just please don't tell the world that unschooling is "hardly doing anything."

UPDATE:  Today I was told that I was actually schooling, not unschooling my kids, because I said we were going to go home and look up more info about the plants we found at the lake.  These moms were under the impression unschooling was "doing nothing and hoping the kids learn."  While I do wish that people would at least read a little John Holt (the guy who coined the term unschooling) before they decide they know what unschooling is, I do understand that with a quick internet search they could come to that conclusion since there are so many people out there claiming to be unschooling, and doing nothing or saying they are doing nothing because they haven't deschooled enough to know they are doing something.    

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgement, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them."
~John Holt~ Teach Your Own

Review of Zoodles

My girls have been playing on Zoodles and they really like it.  Here's my review of it.

 It pulls games from a wide variety of sites, so I don't have to search for games.  It finds them!

Each kid gets their own account and it customizes the games according to her age.

It opens up in a window that takes up the whole screen, so that is the only thing the kids can click on.  This is great, because they can't accidentally go to any other websites or mess up any settings.

Along those same lines, once they choose a game, even though it's on an external website, they can only play THAT game.  If they want another game they go back to zoodles and pick from the list of games.

Some things that I find to be useless (and maybe even harmful for a parent trying to deschool) is the emphasis on dividing the games into subjects.  It creates reports for the parents showing what skills or subjects the child has been learning according to the games they are playing.  The parent also has the option to promote certain subjects, so if you think your child isn't playing enough math games, you can make those the only games they see.  This is the part they charge for, however.  The membership also includes more games and stories, which might make it worth it if my kids get bored of the games and stories available on the free version.  

All in all, it's a great site that I wanted to pass on!  But if you are new to unschooling, and really excited about the educational controls on it, please read here and let your child play the games she wants just for fun.